1991 Accounting Hall of Fame induction: Raymond J. Chambers

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1991 Accounting Hall of Fame Induction
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INDUCTION CITATION
by
Daniel L. Jensen Ernst & Young Professor of Accounting Department of Accounting and Management
Information Systems College of Business, The Ohio State University
Among the most accomplished and respected accounting academicians in the world, he lists his recreations as "reading, writing and arithmetic". A voracious reader with a formidable vocabulary, he has even been known to study the dictionary. Possessed by a strong desire to see language used correctly, he studies the roots of words and their derivation. When he uses a word, you can be assured that it is the right word in the context. What other accounting professor uses the word "floccinaucini-hilipilification"1 ?
A very private person, he is devoted to his wife and their family — a son, two daughters, and seven grandchildren. He and his wife, Margaret, married for forty crowed years, share an interest in opera and usually have a season ticket for the Sydney opera season.
He is known as an effective administrator in part because he could not be bothered wasting time on it. He dealt only with things that mattered. He made the important decisions, left the running of programs to those most directly involved, and got back to his "real" work. Taking advantage of his open door policy, his colleagues could walk into his office at will to argue a point, seek clarification, or get help with a reference. He would be writing when they walked in, put down his pen immediately, and give them his full attention. When the discussion was over, and that was sometimes hours later, he would pick up his pen and just carry on writing as if he had not been interrupted. A mean debater, he never forced his ideas on his colleagues, al-though on occasion he would talk for hours in efforts to con-vince them of the correctness of his arguments.
In this intense and exciting atmosphere, he founded a jour-nal, Abacus, and forged with his colleagues a school of account-ing built on a belief in the primacy of market prices. Indeed, that school of thought usually bears his name. A critic in the
1The habit of treating things as trivial, as of no account.